More Than Just A Frozen Wasteland Antarctica

October 20, 1985|By Yvette Cardozo, Special to the News/Sun-Sentinel

PARADISE, BAY, ANTARCTICA — Paradise Bay finally brought it home to us. We awoke to pure, nearly cloudless sunshine, a rarity in this far south land of the midnight sun. Our small rubber boats slipped into the mirror-smooth cove and we floated in front of 2,000-foot-high walls of rock and snow.

Rivers of crumbly blue glacial ice tumbled between the peaks, turning into a molten platinum flow that oozed across the top of a 1,000-foot sheer wall of ice. This wall ringed the cove. It sagged in spots and cracked like split wood. Every so often, a wavering chunk would break free and tumble into the water. It sounded like thunder.

None of us in the tiny rubber Zodiac boat said a word. Here, at last, was a place that lived up to its advance billing.

We were midway through our two-week cruise from the southern tip of South America down along the Antarctic peninsula. But though we had been in the Antarctic for some days now, the full significance hadn`t hit until this moment. Antarctica does that to a person. It overwhelms you, swallows your mind and leaves you numb. You could easily spend twice the time and not get bored.

Our trip aboard Society Expedition`s 90-passenger ship Explorer had started in Punta Arenas, Chile, at the south end of the South American mainland. We spent a day threading the Beagle Channel, whose banks are cut by glaciers and covered with twisted, weather-beaten trees that look like forests of bonsai. Under any other circumstances, this would be the climax of a scenic cruise. For us, it was merely an appetizer.

Along the way, we met a trawler and traded a haunch of lamb and two cartons of cigarettes for enough still-wiggling king crabs to keep us in fresh seafood salad for the trip. Such is life aboard an ``exploration`` cruise.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

From here, it took two days to cross the Drake Passage, during which time we got to know each other. Voyages like this bring out a wonderfully strange and varied bunch. There was the ever-smiling J.W. Canty, an admitted travel junkie who`d been on 49 cruises, has a penchant for pink sweaters and is an Episcopal priest who held on-board services for us. Larry Gould, a young California attorney, spent his spare hours negotiating cable TV rights for Chilean Antarctic research stations. White-haired Vida Wentz, a pediatrician, led the pack in our walks up the glacial mountains. Selma Farber, 81, a retired secretary, saves her Social Security money for these trips. Next year, she`s off to New Zealand.

Sometime during the second night, we officially arrived in the Antarctic.

Nothing can quite prepare you for that first glimpse. We were in a narrow channel surrounded on all sides by ice. The top of the ice wall was flat and smooth, draped like cream frosting across a cake, but the sides were eaten by sun and wind into a tortured series of folds. Vertical fissures cracked this mantle, shining irridescent blue from their depths.

VISITING PENGUINS

The Explorer`s hull is reinforced, so the captain ground the bow of our ship into a table of ice beside a penguin rookery. We walked down ladders as if this were a dock and ambled across the frozen plain.

This was the first of many visits to see penguins. If nothing else, the Antarctic has penguins and sea birds, ``one sixth of all the world`s sea birds,`` said our ornithologist Peter Harrison, who was beside himself with excitement after having just recorded the world`s first sighting outside New Zealand of a southern royal albatross.

For most people, Antarctica is a thin white strip on the bottom of their map. We were now beginning to see it as a round continent with mountain ranges, mileages and history.

Antarctica is a 5.4-million-square-mile disk with ice two miles thick locking up 90 percent of the world`s fresh water. Melt it all and the world`s sea level would rise 100 feet, obliterating such trifles as New York City and most of coastal Europe.

The search for gold may have founded South America but the treasure hunt in Antarctica is for scientific knowledge. Robert Falcon Scott`s exploratory team lost the race to the South Pole yet continued to drag 37 pounds of geological samples. They lugged the rocks to their deaths. Today, there are 52 year-round scientific stations representing 14 countries.

MEETING THE RESEARCHERS

Later on our first day in the Antarctic, the ice pack got thicker until it seemed we were carving through a heaving soup. But we made it to Faraday, a British research station.

Faraday was filled with young scientists, grinning shyly at their first visitors in nine months. They shared their homemade brew, a strong lemony beer, while furiously cancelling Antarctica stamps on our postcards,

Stamps, stickers and T-shirts are a hot business in south polar research stations. Scientists trade among themselves so the occasional tourist finds a ready-made souvenir system. At the Polish Arctowski station, a whole room is crammed with stickers and pamphlets. Chile`s Marsh station has its own store.